German to Bosnian: five animals can take a singular verb without becoming one animal
The numeral can govern a different noun form
German noun phrases carry case information, often most visibly on an article rather than the noun itself. A Bosnian translation must also construct the appropriate case relationships, but the German noun form does not predict the Bosnian one. This is especially important in counted expressions, where the number can affect the form of the noun and its associated words.
The BCS textbook’s Bosnian section illustrates a group of five cats, using pet with a genitive plural noun. Its grammar discussion explains genitive plural after numbers above the one-to-four range, with specified treatment of compound numbers. A German phrase meaning “five cats” therefore cannot be translated by taking an ordinary Bosnian plural and placing an unchanged number word before it. The numeral belongs to the target grammatical construction.
A singular verb is not an instruction to change the quantity
The textbook gives Pet mačaka ide u grad, meaning that five cats are going to town, and identifies third-person singular agreement with this quantified subject pattern. The group still contains five animals. A German reader may expect plural verb agreement because the source makes the plurality of its subject explicit, but Bosnian agreement in the illustrated construction follows a different rule.
Imagine a German transport message meaning “Five students are coming, not four.” The numerical contrast is the point of the message. A target singular verb should not prompt an editor to replace five with one or reinterpret the students as a single named person. Equally, leaving every target verb in a German-style plural arrangement merely to resemble the source can ignore the construction that the Bosnian numeral requires. Number of referents and surface agreement must be considered separately.
Quantity and possession are not the same use of the genitive
The textbook also uses genitive forms after quantity expressions meaning much, many, or a little, distinguishing countable groups from amounts such as water. Thus a Bosnian genitive noun following a quantity word need not mean “of somebody” or identify an owner. German readers accustomed to associating genitive case with possession should identify the quantity expression before supplying an ownership interpretation.
Compare the meanings “many students,” “the students’ room,” and “a little water.” The first concerns a countable group, the second connects a room to people, and the third concerns an amount of a substance. A shared target case label does not make their relationships interchangeable. In a German message that lists refreshments for five guests, the number of guests and amount of water are different facts; the Bosnian phrases may employ related case machinery while expressing those different quantities. Keep the original count and the countable-versus-substance distinction intact. The target noun and verb forms should then be judged within their quantified phrases, rather than altered to reproduce the German sentence’s visible plural endings.
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